They call it Sir Paul’s Cathedral – and walking past the Francis Crick Institute on a glorious winter’s day it is easy to see why. The sun bounces off the enormous coloured panes that stretch high above the streets around St Pancras, illuminating what will soon be one of Europe’s largest biomedical research facilities, while its solid, ochre facade echoes the immutable exterior of many an ancient edifice.

Navigating through the construction site, hard hat perched on my head, I enter the interior. It is hardly less ecclesiastical – a vast nave cuts through the centre of a cavernous atrium, intersected by what looks suspiciously like a transept, while its basement – reaching four floors beneath my feet and set to house a multitude of sensitive scientific instruments – bears more than a passing resemblance to a tremendous network of vaults.

“I do think architecture matters,” says Sir Paul Nurse, former president of the Royal Society, Nobel laureate and now director of the Crick – to which his name has somewhat wittily been attached – when we meet in his temporary office at the Wellcome Trust. “You need to go into a building and feel inspiration. That is what is so beautiful about a medieval cathedral – you are inspired whatever your religious beliefs might be.”

For £700m, however, it isn’t surprising that Nurse is hoping the building will do more than lift the spirits. Boasting state-of-the-art equipment, high-containment labs and animal facilities to house rodents, zebrafish and even opossums, the Crick’s ambitions are as lofty as its rafters. With around 1,500 scientists and staff tackling areas ranging from cancer research to neuroscience, pandemics, and even bold new projects to use genome-editing techniques on human embryos, life itself will be under the microscope.

It’s certainly a feat of teamwork. A joint endeavour between six founding bodies – the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK, together with King’s, University and Imperial Colleges, London – the swish institute will supersede what were venerable, but ageing, MRC facilities at Mill Hill, north London, and the two sites that made up Cancer Research’s London Research Institute, bringing together their existing staff with newly recruited researchers and seconded university academics. It’s a point Nurse is quick to seize on. “People forget that the money is already there – it is not new money for the operations,” he says. “It is new money for the buildings, but it is just replacing what’s there.”

But there are perhaps inevitably concerns. “I think one of the biggest risks is that we have got some of the biggest funders supporting the Crick institute, and I think there is a danger they are going to want to support things happening in that institute and perhaps we are going to create even more of a have/have not scientific society,” says Professor Jenny Southgate, director of the Jack Birch unit for molecular carcinogenesis at the University of York.

Robert Kelsh, professor of stem cell and developmental genetics at the University of Bath, also has mixed feelings: “I think the Crick is great; it will do tremendously well,” he says. “[But] I think people, especially outside London, have some concerns about it – just the total amount of grant funding that it will inevitably be able to attract.” After all, when it comes to landing grants “the Crick has all the advantages,” he adds, comparing the extent of the institute’s resources to those of universities.

I do think architecture matters. You need to go into a building and feel inspiration.

Sir Paul Nurse

Experiments lie at the heart of the Crick – and Nurse is embarking on a very large one of his own. Sweeping away departmental divisions ubiquitous in academia, he hopes to hand the purse strings back to the institute’s 120 group leaders rather than having them controlled by a few departmental “barons”. The need to chase grant after grant, a common chore for scientists to raise cash for their studies, will be mitigated by a pot of core funding for each lab. Publishing pressures will be diminished, too, with researchers freed from the need to repeatedly jump over the hurdles of peer review to garner support, allowing them instead to focus on adventurous, longer-term research. “We will capture high-profile papers too, but what the focus is [on] is not using surrogates, not using the Nature reviewing process to judge your own work,” Nurse says, adding that with a senior management team including winners of the prestigious Louis-Jeantet Prize and a veritable gaggle of fellows of the Royal Society to sniff out good research: “We have pretty good noses”.

And there’s more. Instead of departments, scientists will flit between so-called “interest groups” as their work develops, while researchers in different fields have been carefully allocated offices and labs in a manner that would rival the most painstaking of seating plans. The upshot, Nurse hopes, will be “gentle anarchy”. It could be a description of Nurse himself. In the midst of his explanations, he looks around for a way to illustrate his plan to hasten the translation of promising research into innovations and therapies. I proffer my pen but he seizes instead on a selection of mugs that he proceeds to scatter over the table. “Let’s say this table represents knowledge,” he begins, rapidly shuffling his props around like a magician embarking on the three-cup trick.

On completion the new Crick insitute will stretch over 12 levels, eight above ground level and four below. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

His idea turns out to be far less convoluted than his method of explanation. Instead of embracing purely blue-sky research, or focusing on the pursuit of distant goals, the Crick, says Nurse, will take a different tack. Here, scientists will work closely with a team of experts as they pursue their research, helping to spot and develop discoveries with clinical potential or that could prove handy in other fields. “We actually reward people who make discoveries, but we always look to see whether those discoveries can lead to translation too.”

What’s more, Nurse adds, collaborations with pharmaceutical companies will offer Crick scientists the chance to benefit from the expertise of industry. I suggest that not everyone will warm to the idea of cosying up to big pharma, but Nurse – unsurprisingly – isn’t buying it. “What we are doing is saying there is creative work going on in the big companies with creative people, we are creative people working often with somewhat different objectives – there can be no harm in mixing us together, we control our IP [intellectual property].”

It’s a daring vision, but not an entirely unprecedented one. “The Crick’s idea is not completely new at all, but I would also argue it is proven,” says Kelsh, citing his own experiences of a similar interdisciplinary approach at other laboratories. Nurse, too, believes the Crick is built on solid foundations. “All I have done is stolen best practice as I see it from around the world,” he says, citing New York’s Rockefeller University (where he was president for eight years) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory among his inspirations. His plan, however, is embedded not only in the ethos of the Crick, but in the building itself. Gleaming staircases snake up to the uppermost floors, encouraging chance encounters between scientists and – it is hoped – new collaborations. Sleek, white-topped benches await the arrival of their many and varied workers, while walls open out like the secret cabinets of a speakeasy bar to reveal whiteboards for the scribblings of what, its creators no doubt fervently hope, will be the musings of spontaneous genius.

But you can only lead a horse to water. “To an extent I think it is marvellous putting everyone together. There should be massive synergy from having such a lot of different expertise, people with different skills, different thoughts, different backgrounds, it should be fantastic,” says Southgate. “But you can’t force people to work together, and just putting them in the same room doesn’t mean that is going to happen.”

The new Crick Institute near St Pancras, London Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

Might scientists elsewhere in the UK also be a bit, well, miffed that London has yet another plump institute to its name? “What is the engine room of research? It is 20-35-year-olds,” Nurse parries. “They like London. Let’s be blunt about it. And if I am trying to attract from New York or Tokyo or Berlin I am not going to do it if I am somewhere in the sticks.” Not only will the location allow scientists to easily visit or receive guests from other institutes around the country but, Nurse insists, the Crick will fuel research nationwide by pumping out imaginative, risk-taking researchers, as many of the new group leaders will be recruited for a fixed stint of 12 years. “It is a training institute that takes scientists at a rather early stage in their careers, where they are often creative but can be vulnerable, a bit green, [and] gives them really good training, good mentoring, good support,” says Nurse. “We then try to export them to universities elsewhere in the country.”

However, as Southgate points out, the approach brings pressures of its own for researchers. “They are going to have six years, and a potential further six, living in London with no security of tenure, knowing that they are going to have to move and find something after that. I think that creates pressures, I don’t think it is very family friendly.”

Enticing bright young researchers to London is one thing; making it affordable in a city of soaring housing costs is another. His dream, Nurse says, is to get hold of a set of apartments to house newcomers to the UK while they find their feet. “I tried to get that money from funders but they weren’t prepared to do that.” He looks a little dejected, but he hasn’t quite given up on his scheme. “[It’s] back in my head,” he says, prodding his somewhat dishevelled mop of white hair. Other hurdles have been met with a more bullish resilience. At the mention of Crossrail 2, the proposed train line that will cut across the city, he bristles. “When we put the building up, Crossrail 2 was going south of the Euston road. And then what happens is Crossrail 2 changes its mind and drives a tunnel right under our most sensitive part.” That, he says, would be disastrous. “It will stop us working probably during construction, maybe for years.” The line, Nurse maintains, will simply have to find another route. “They are really angry with us because they are having to think about it,” he says. It isn’t only the rail companies that have attempted to undermine the Crick. Some, I point out, are concerned it will become an institute simply too big to fail.

Dr James Briscoe, left, Dr Caroline Hill, and Professor Nick Luscombe, researchers at the new Crick Institute. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

“Actually, I coined that term,” he interjects with something verging on amusement. “I said it will be too big to fail because we have to make it work.”

And if it doesn’t? “If a university stops working properly, they sort it out. If a hospital doesn’t work properly, they sort it out. If this doesn’t work properly, you’d sort it out,” he says. Nurse is nothing if not pragmatic. “If the philosophy is wrong, we will learn from it and change it. I am not chiselling this into my tombstone. I think we should try this and if it works then it will be, I think, a big step forward. If there are aspects that don’t, then we can modify them. And if it all doesn’t work, they can sack me.”

Quite what success will look like is another matter – particularly with traditional metrics, such as publishing records, given less credence. Nurse, however, is blunt. “We will be reviewed every five years by our funders, so if we haven’t succeeded by producing high-quality work – some of which will be in those high-profile journals, of course – we will have failed. We have to pass and in my view we have to pass it at a higher level of standard than any university in the land, otherwise there is no point in having us.”

In many ways, the Crick is the natural home for big thinkers. Named after one Nobel laureate and directed by another, it’s garnered support from some of the biggest names in science. Indeed, among its donors is Francis Crick’s DNA co-pioneer, James Watson, who offered a donation to pay for a portrait of his friend to hang in the institute.

“Typically Jim, he was making jokes and saying wouldn’t it be fun to have Crick in his bath,” says Nurse.

The plans for the final portrait, however, are rather less eccentric. Leaning out from in front of a blackboard, his hands resting on his seminal papers, Crick gazes forth. A tie bearing the double-helix is looped around his neck. And on his face, it seems, is a look of quiet expectation.